In those days you took your seat on your particular fancy in coaches, and paid your sixteen-shilling fare from London to Brighton, or _vice versa_, trusting (yet with heaviness of heart) in Providence to bring you to a happy issue from all the many dangers and discomforts of travelling. Occasionally it was brought home, by storm and flood, to those learned enough to know it, that "travelling" derived originally from "travail," and the discomforts of leaving one's own fireside in the winter are emphasized and underscored in the particulars of what befell at Stonepound in the great snowstorm of December 24th, 1836--a storm that paralysed communications throughout the kingdom. "The Brighton up-mail of Sunday had travelled about eight miles from that town, when it fell into a drift of snow, from which it was impossible to extricate it without assistance. The guard immediately set off to obtain all necessary aid, but when he returned no trace whatever could be found, either of the coach, coachman or passengers, three in number. After much difficulty the coach was found, but could not be extricated from the hollow into which it had got. The guard did not reach London until seven o'clock on Tuesday night, having been obliged to travel with the bags on horseback, and in many instances to leave the main road and proceed across fields in order to avoid the deep drifts of snow. "The passengers, coachman, and guard slept at Clayton, seven miles from Brighton. The road from Hand Cross was quite impassable. The non-arrival of the mail at Crawley induced the postmaster there to send a man in a gig to ascertain the cause on Monday afternoon, and no tidings being heard of man, gig, or horse for several hours, another man was despatched on horseback. After a long search he found horse and gig completely built up in the snow. The man was in an exhausted state. After considerable difficulty the horse and gig were extricated, and the party returned to Crawley. The man had learned no tidings of the mail, and refused to go out again on any such exploring mission." The Brighton mail from London, too, reached Crawley, but was compelled to return. [Sidenote: CLAYTON TUNNEL ACCIDENT] Such were the incidents upon which the Christmas stories, of the type brought into favour by Dickens, were built, but the stories are better to read than the incidents to experience. I am retrospectively sorry for those passengers who thus lost their Christmas dinners; but after all, it was better to miss the turkey and the Christmas pudding than to be "mashed into a pummy" in railway accidents, such as the awful heart-shaking series of collisions which took place on Sunday, August 25th, 1861, in the railway tunnel through Clayton Hill. On that day, in that gloomy place, twenty-four persons lost their lives, and one hundred and seventy-five were injured.